Techie: Importing D90, D300s and D3s dmovie video into Premiere Pro

Alex — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:46:34 +0000

Edit: Apparently this also works on the D300s and the D3s! Feel free to share your experiences in the comments.
Edit2 -The non-techie way… OK this subject appears to get an awful lot of attention and some people are having problems following all the steps/not liking using the terminal. As such I’ve decided to be nice to you all and package up an automator script which does all the heavy lifting for you. No need to use the Terminal with this method. Check out the method section for details.

So this is the first of a couple of techie posts to my blog. I know, I know you all come here for the pictures of Orcs but hey this is my way of helping other professional photographers save a bit of time and hair pulling.

The D90 is a Nikon camera used by Holly and myself which allows the recording of HD video. What makes it special is the fact that it has a large sensor and can use any nikon lens, this in turn means you can get truly cinema like depth of feel. If you don’t have a D90 and Premier, I suggest you bail out now, else..

The D90 unfortunately shoots a bit of a bizarre format which premiere claims is an unsupported compression type. However it lies! Thanks to Jean-Luc for helping me to figure it out but I think the main problem is that Premiere is an old Carbon based application and can’t quite understand the D90 file type.

Method1: The non techie way:

Download your movies as per normal and place them in a directory on their own
Download this zip file
Extract both files to your /Application directory (Note that SetFile must be in this directory or else the script won’t work)
Double click to run SetFileApp
Select the directory with all your D90 movies in it which need to be changed
Profit!

Method2: For those who like the gory details:

Download the movies as you normally would and make a note of where you’ve stored them.
Either install the Mac Developer tools or visit this page to download the setfile application
Fire up the Terminal application (yes I know this is scary and I may try and automate this for people in the future…)
if you downloaded setfile rather than installing the developer tools, cd into the directory where is it located eg: cd downloads/setfile – tip: if you press tab twice the terminal will autocomplete things for you!
In the terminal run this command to set the correct file type SetFile -t "VfW " pathtofolderwithyourmovies/*.AVI eg (SetFile -t "VfW " movies/test/*.AVI)
In the terminal again run this command to rename the files to .mov: rename -v 's/\.AVI$/\.mov/' pathtofolderwithyourmovies/*.AVI
You should find all of your movies have now been renamed to .mov and will now all open in premier!

So there you go, that’s how you open D90 movies in premier for editing. If anybody has any problems hit me up in the comments.

Alex

Alex Beckett Photography » d90

Techie: Importing D90, D300s and D3s dmovie video into Premiere Pro